June kaiju frenzy

I don't think I've been intentionally tailoring my viewing to what can broadly be defined as kaiju movies, but the fact remains, June is only half over and I have already seen four movies that can be said to feature kaiju. 

Two of them have Japanese origins and two do not.

The first -- chronologically, but also in my heart -- was Godzilla Minus One, whose title made think it was going to be some sort of high concept movie. Having watched the movie and gaining no clearer understanding of what "minus one" means, I've decided that it must be a numbering convention to indicate a prequel, although I don't know what it would be a prequel to. (I looked up if there was a movie called Godzilla Zero, but there are no exact matches for that on IMDB.) Anyway, I thought it was great.

The next weekend, it was Netflix again as Ultraman: Rising debuted. This film has game-changing animation, but still gives a nod to its anime origins. It involves the titular superhero from Japanese comics, who is about the size of a kaiju and whose purpose is to save Japanese cities from them. In this instances, he also comes into possession of an orphaned baby kaiju and tries to raise it, though even the baby kaiju is massive and can do a lot of unwitting damage. As a cherry on top of this, it's also a baseball movie as Ultraman's alter ego is a massive baseball star in the mold of Shohei Ohtani. (And incidentally, this also has a title that sounds like it should be a prequel.)

The same night that I finished Ultraman, which I had started too late on Friday night, I also watched The Mist, which I wrote about yesterday. Although you would not call the creatures in this movie traditional kaiju, mostly because the movie is set in Maine, some of these beasties are as tall as a kaiju and just as bloodthirsty.

Then finally on Sunday afternoon I watched the original King Kong from 1933. That's right, just like that without any fanfare. I say "without any fanfare" because for some ten years now I have been considering this the movie I am most embarrassed about never having seen, so I thought when I finally did see it, it would have to be some special occasion. The special occasion was that I still that the projector set up from watching the Celtics game the day before, and this had been in my Kanopy queue for too long. I ended up being pretty wowed by how much they were capable of doing, only six years into the sound era -- and I use that just as a general gauge of cinematic sophistication at the time, not specifically because King Kong's achievements are groundbreaking from a sound perspective. But I found the stop motion pretty damn good, and was surprised they could do it as well as that at the time. I can only imagine the movie magic people must have felt when they went to the cinema that night.

Now that I've noticed the pattern, any future June kaiju movies will be tainted.